


Your Name Is John Lalonde, And You Are Dead

by himemiyaa



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Christmas, Dream Bubbles, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-28
Updated: 2013-02-28
Packaged: 2017-12-03 22:14:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/703208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/himemiyaa/pseuds/himemiyaa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John Lalonde wakes up in a dream bubble.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Your Name Is John Lalonde, And You Are Dead

Your name is John Lalonde, and you are not too keen on this whole “dead” thing.

It’s been coming since Jade died, of course. Can’t have a session without a time player. Rose had said that. Something she heard on a breeze. She’d kind of gone on and on about the breeze. Not that you had minded, really. Her verbosity, though it was more often than not about silly movies you hadn’t seen, had been endearing. It made you think of happier times. Even before all this you went to her first, with all your problems. She listened to what you said and then she would give you a little bit of advice, and then she would drop it. Boom. No more sad John, just Rose telling you about that weird Hard Candy movie she likes so much. You can recite her speech about how Ellen Page is the best young actress of our times by heart.

You’d never even met her. Not in real life. She had been really excited for that, about getting to meet you guys, even if she never really said it. You wish it had worked like that. Now you’re all dead. Rose had died first, of course. Stabbed in the stomach by Dave’s freaky bird of hell or whatever he’d created when he prototyped that…thing. None of you had even known about it until it was too late to bring her back. She was buried by LOWAS, a breeze blowing sand over her pale body.

Dave had been next. Narcolepsy wasn’t good when you were fighting imps.

Then Jade. Bird thingy again. Stabbed her in the throat – it was pretty brutal, and you had sobbed. You’d sobbed over Dave, too, of course. But you hadn’t felt anything. You’d felt…numb. Not like you had felt when you found out Rose was dead. That had struck you to your core. You’d shaken and screamed – the consorts in the Land of Light and Rain had already been a little bit afraid of you, but after that they shut their little windows when you passed by.

You haven’t opened your eyes yet. You don’t want to admit to yourself that you failed. You will never see your mother again, never knit another scarf. You had been teaching Rose how to knit over webcam. She said she needed a hobby and suddenly you were her tutor. There was a fine line between her deciding things for you being annoying and endearing, not that you’d have ever told her, despite the fact that you thought a LOT of things about her were like that. Those were probably the things you had missed the most since she-

“Hey! Lalonde!”  
You blink, your train of thought interrupted, and you sit up, sore in your stomach where Jack’s sword pierced you but remarkably full of flesh and not stabby gore. The voice is swimming in your ears, almost shimmering, beyond reality. You open your eyes and light floods in. It burns a little. You groan.

“Easy there,” the voice laughs. You’re still a little bit blinded, but the world starts to come into focus. You don’t recognize where you are except from photos Rose has sent you. There are identical houses decked with Christmas lights, a thin dusting of snow beginning to fall on your shoulders and the grass you are lying in. You shiver for a moment, suddenly aware of the cold, and then a scarf lands around your shoulders.

“Come on, John, wake up!” You look at the scarf. It’s blue, kind of shoddy. Like the knitter hadn’t practiced as much as you told her to.

“Hi, Rose,” you say, and you can’t help but grin as her arms wrap around your neck from behind. You aren’t sure how to handle the physical affection – you never have been good at it – and the two of you tumble into the ground together. Her skin and hair are so white that she nearly blends into the snow. For a moment you are both silent, her normal bubbling loquaciousness quelled by the stars reflecting in your glasses and your eyes. You smile at her, for once feeling like all the world like the kids that you are. After all, you had only been in the game for just a little while when you both died. In the end it’s only been a few days since Rose’s thirteenth birthday. Suddenly Rose stands up and you’re compelled to follow her, linking your fingers with hers in a mixture of adolescent awkwardness and the comfort that she always manages to bring you. She leads you into one of the houses, lights strung high and the air smelling vaguely of baked goods. There is a plastic tree in the living room and these weird harlequins she complains about everywhere.

You remember that you’re holding hands and your breath catches in your chest, but she just squeezes your hand like she knows all of your thoughts. You bet her god tier would have had something to do with that. Know-it-all. You suppress a grin. You hear footsteps coming down the stairs and she drops your hand and kisses your cheek, and you are so startled by the soft texture of her lips that Dave pulling you into a hug and Jade calmly nodding her head with a “sup” goes practically unnoticed. Your cheeks flush red. (If you were looking at Rose, you would see that hers are, too.)

Your friends are smiling and laughing and so are you. For once it isn’t even a lonely weird kid’s façade, presented to the world to make it seem like nothing bothers you. This time it’s real.

And plus, Rose keeps leaning her head on your shoulder, and then away from you, and you glance at each other, and then away again, and finally Dave throws a sprig of mistletoe at the two of you (“I’ve been growing it! It’s pretty much the coolest fucking plant.”) and you kiss Rose Egbert because they won’t stop staring but also because she has the most utterly kissable face you’ve ever seen. Not to mention voice and words and mind and wow.

It sucks, of course. Your teeth bump against her braces and you’re both giggling nervously. But then, you have eternity to practice.

The snow falls outside and a snow white head falls asleep on your shoulder.

Your name is John Lalonde, and you think you’re okay with this whole “afterlife” thing if it means you get to hold Rose like this forever.

**Author's Note:**

> this was done for fuckyeahjohnrose's fic trade back in september i think it's been ages idk


End file.
